thumb captionApple has cut the daily AI spending cap for some engineers from $300 to $200, and deeper cuts may follow.
Last month, the iPhone maker quietly cut the daily AI spending cap for some of its engineers from $300 to $200, according to a Bloomberg report. Apple is planning to bring daily allowances for some engineering teams down to as little as $100, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. Many teams outside engineering already work with a $100 daily cap, and Apple has considered lowering that to just $25 for some of them. John Ternus, who took over as Apple CEO on September 1, wants the company to run faster and leaner, with fewer layers of management.
Some divisions have already hired outside consultants to review their efficiency, Bloomberg reported, leaving employees uneasy about restructuring.
Some teams are now being told to move to cheaper models or to AI that runs locally on devices. Apple is putting a tighter limit on how much its employees can spend on AI tools at work. Engineers who need more than that will now have to seek an exemption from senior leadership. The change is part of a wider cost-cutting push at Apple. It comes even as the company is asking employees to bring AI deeper into how they write code and run day-to-day operations. The cuts may not end there. These budgets are measured in tokens, the units of text and data an AI model processes with every request. Providers bill by the token, and advanced models cost more. Coding eats through tokens faster than most tasks, so engineers feel the squeeze first. Apple employees have access to Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
The company said this week that research and development spending grew 32% in fiscal 2026, driven by higher infrastructure and AI costs. Operating expenses rose 22% to $75.5 billion, or 16% of total net sales. Tesla has put a $200 weekly limit on employee AI spending. Uber caps individual AI coding tools at $1,500 a month, after burning through its entire 2026 Claude Code budget by April.
Meta has introduced token budgets and nudged staff towards its in-house tools, while Goldman Sachs has restricted access to some AI coding tools.
Apple has also been leaning on AI for core work, with hardware chief Johny Srouji saying last year that generative AI could be “a huge productivity boost” for chip design. In an internal email, executive vice president Jay Parikh told staff that “tokenmaxxing is not what we are optimizing for. Meanwhile, Apple’s overall bill keeps rising. Apple is not the first big tech company to rein in its AI tab. Microsoft has set token budgets for every division and switched its default internal model to a cheaper one.
Some staff say few people came close to the old $300 cap anyway. The real pinch would come with the $100 caps, which could push heavier users into filing exemption requests just to keep working the way they do now. Reactions to the new limits are mixed. Others see the cuts as a possible prelude to layoffs. Now the bills have arrived, and at Apple, anyone who wants to keep spending big will first have to make the case to the top. You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.
Earlier this year, companies pushed staff to use as much AI as they could, a trend the industry nicknamed tokenmaxxing.